It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. Like other Members who have spoken, I am in no way, shape or form an opponent of solar energy. However, like others, I believe that solar technology and solar farms would be best placed on our factories and brownfield sites, away from the beautiful Great British countryside. I very much agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) about preserving and protecting the character of an area.
Planning guidance is already clear: where possible, large solar farms should use previously developed land. Projects should be designed to avoid, mitigate and—where necessary—compensate for impact. However, my constituents have been bombarded with applications for large solar farms across north Buckinghamshire. Since I was elected just over two years ago, I have already opposed five applications for solar farms, including in Little Horwood, the village of Kingsey, on Callie’s Farm and between the villages of Ford and Dinton. All those solar farms would have dominated rural villages and completely changed the character and rural nature of those places; in one case, it would have destroyed ancient farmland.
Most recently, I have objected to two solar farms in the peaceful villages of Leckhampstead and Slapton. My constituents have expressed concerns about the inappropriate scale and nature of the proposals. The solar farms will add no net benefits to the local area and will have a considerable impact on the environment and wildlife. They will fundamentally alter the character of those villages and the surrounding countryside.
The Leckhampstead solar farm site is on rising ground, bounded and clearly visible from the surrounding high and low ground from the west and south. The woodland bordering the northern edge of the site is a prominent feature in the local landscape. Slapton village already has one smaller-scale solar farm, which is ugly and visible from Ivinghoe Beacon. The scale of that application is such that it completely surrounds and overwhelms the northern end of Slapton.
The company behind this development, having seen my objection, tried to make out in a letter to me the other day that it would not be a blight and sent me photos of other schemes as evidence. Yet every single one of the photos it sent me were of ugly masses of grey and black plastic, metal and glass, in place of natural beauty, grass and crops. Let us be absolutely frank: there is no way on earth that replacing our beautiful British countryside with hundreds of thousands of acres of these monstrosities up and down the land could possibly be considered anything other than total vandalism and blight.
With Buckinghamshire facing a tidal wave of these solar farms and of development on greenfield sites and working agricultural land, it is vital, as others have said, that we take a step away and recognise that agricultural land is a finite resource. We need to come up with a new solution that puts solar on brownfield, and on the top of the factories and tall buildings in our cities and towns, and that protects the Great British countryside.
3.31 pm